Category: Current Affairs (Page 8 of 17)

The things we take for granted

June 17, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

Riot senior producer Travis George put up a post on the forums yesterday evening asking what Riot had been doing well lately and for suggestions for improvements. It was a really nice way to ask for feedback, one that I think can easily be as valuable to a company as criticism can be. It can be tough to know, especially with a community as large as League of Legends. I’ve been trying to round out my MOBA knowledge lately, spending time with the few games that are out there and a couple different beta products. It’s been a great reminder of the many things that League of Legends does so well.

For one thing, it is definitely the most responsive game. That sounds like a strange thing to get excited about, but play a game in which the controls and UI feel sluggish and you’ll know what I mean. Even basic things, like altering the cursor sprite so that I know a spell is queued up, don’t show in several other games. The only game that holds a candle to LoL in terms of responsiveness (from the MOBA world) is HoN, but even that feels a little slow at times.

League of Legends is also hands down the easiest to understand by just watching the screen. I truly believe the downfall of many modern games is that they try to hard to look cool or edgy and just end up looking ridiculous. Demigod might be the only game that really made modern graphics look good (seriously, how cool was Rook), but even that game was a bit hard to grasp by watching the battlefield. I think any RTS player could easily sort out what is happening in a LoL match without much effort. I’m not sure the same can be said for several other MOBA franchises.

This last one is a matter of personal taste, but I like that the League of Legends UI attempts to teach the player the game. That little line from turret to target is a perfect example of a teaching mechanic in game. The player gets immediate feedback when he steps in range of the turret. It’s clear who/what the turret is targeting. It’s also clear when it changes targets, allowing players to analyze what action caused the change. I totally take it for granted, but playing games that don’t have those features makes me want to pull out what’s left of my hair.

I could go on for a while, but I would probably be violating an NDA or two with some comparisons, and that’s just not my style. The point here is that there is a lot of excellent design behind League of Legends that I probably don’t mention enough.

Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

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Riot’s take on the E3 info

June 11, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

Riot has graciously stepped onto the E3 news scene with its own explanations of the champions and features in development for League of Legends. Thank god. That Gamespot video just wasn’t cutting it.

The video rehashes a lot of the information I’ve put together on Yorick, Leona, and Skarner, though Paul Bellezza did expand on Skarner’s design direction a bit. In case there was any doubt, it looks like Tanky DPS is here to stay. Bellezza called Yorick a “tanky fighter” who can “pretty much tank down anyone.” Skarner is a “vicious and aggressive fighter tank” (the extent to which that’s different from a tanky fighter is unclear) who allows you to “focus on enemies and the more you attack them, the more you debuff them and are able to take them down.” Wedged in between these two is an archetypal tank with some crowd control abilities. If ever there was a bad time to be a squishy, July and August will surely top it.

I’m hoping that those releases will also come with some itemization/character updates that help deal with Tanky DPS. The idea behind tankier champions is a fine one – longer fights means you get to play the game more – but when it comes at the expense of so many characters and when so much of the playstyle revolves around skills like Jarvan’s passive, the gameplay isn’t very fun. This is the big reason I don’t play Tanky DPS toons – they aren’t enjoyable. It’s fun to get a ranged carry farmed up and burn through enemies. It’s fun to drop Tibbers on a group of opponents and see huge chunks of health fly off. If Riot can find a way to make these longer fights similarly enjoyable, I’ll gladly take the addition of more Tanky DPS champions to the League.

Champions, Current Affairs, Development, league of legends, News

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I’m being trolled by a health bar bug

June 7, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

Before I started writing this post, I did a quick search for just about every combination of “league of legends health bar bug” that I could. I figured my own problem would be at the top of the heap, but it seems a lot of people have a lot of strange bugs regarding health bars in League of Legends.

I’ve seen the bug that makes an ally health bar stretch across the screen, but other than that I’ve been bug free…until now. I’ve been having a bug since (as far as I remember) the Vayne patch that causes enemy health bars to not update with their health count. It only happens on occasion, but when it does it’s extremely frustrating. The bug is simply that the health bar over an enemy player’s head sometimes does not update to accurately reflect the amount of health a player has. This is extremely problematic in the early game, when players sometimes don’t buy early health items. I roll in thinking the player has 7-800 health, when in reality they’ll have 12-1300. Big difference. I’m starting to catch on, but the health bar system is so ingrained in my playstyle now that I’m having trouble remembering not to fight certain targets. The bug also happens infrequently enough that I forget about it, but only until I get smoked by someone I was sure I would be able to kill.

Anyone else suffering from the same bug?

Current Affairs, league of legends

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Reducing global ult range doesn’t solve the design problem

June 5, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

Among the big changes slated for upcoming League of Legends patches is a rework to the global ults in the game, most notably the ones that that teleport the player to a new location. Riot has said in several places (none of which I can seem to find, though this quote from Phreak serves as an indicator of the design decision) that they want to limit the range of what are now global ults so that they work more like Nocturne’s Paranoia. The problem, of course, is that this doesn’t solve the problem with global ults.

Globals suck because they allow players to effectively be in two places at once. As Phreak mentions in the quote linked above, TF and Shen can go push bot during a mid stalemate, all the while planning to port mid when needed. They present all the defense necessary for mid lane while still being able to push bottom. This scenario isn’t completely fixed by limiting the range of those ultimates, but teamfights aren’t the only thing affected by semi-global ults.

When players can gank in a 3500 unit radius around them, they don’t have to play with any kind of foresight or worry about positioning. They can linger longer in the jungle. They can finish that dragon before defending a tower. They can spring out of the jungle from beyond ward range for the gank. In short, it encourages lazy play from less skilled players and offers masters of the game an easily exploited advantage. It’s also just not a lot of fun to play against.

Personally, I’d love to see the global ults removed. They’re too strong for skilled players and don’t provide the learning hurdle for map positioning that new players need.

Current Affairs, Development, league of legends

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Is the early game too passive?

June 4, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

If you watched the Dreamhack qualifiers, you may have noticed just how passive the early game is. It didn’t take Dreamhack to reveal that fact, though. Think of the last game in which a player died before the five minute mark and wasn’t called a noob. Yeah, I can’t think of one either. The early game in League of Legends has become extremely passive, a fifteen minute race to 100-minion counts with the occasional dragon. There’s a great thread on the forums discussing the issue, which I’ll leave you to read at your leisure. I think the poster, ParoX, makes some great points about contributing factors, but I think there’s another system in play that adds to the passive early game. Early game deaths are just too penalizing.

A couple months ago, Riot adjusted death timers in the early game to make deaths less punishing, but I’m still seeing towers drop before the five minute mark fairly regularly. When an early death means the loss of early lane protection, players tend to be much more conservative in what they will attempt.

A big chunk of the penalty can be attributed to the strength of junglers. Early ganks often happen when a jungler makes a move, turning a lane fight into a 3v2. If a kill succeeds, three champions are now pushing a turret that is often not well protected. If the tower drops, the game shifts dramatically, especially for the team that lost the tower. Because junglers rely on jungle creeps for XP, those players get territorial, leaving few places for the beaten lane to farm. This also opens the winning lane combo up for roaming, increasing the passivity of other lanes by presenting more threats from the brush near each lane.

I think one thing Riot should seriously consider is a nerf to early game jungling, at least at the rate jungling can currently be accomplished. The fact that junglers can keep pace and in some cases outlevel lanes, all in the cover of fog of war is kinda silly. What I would really like to see is a move toward roaming instead of jungling. Unlike jungling, at least for many junglers, roaming has some serious risk. The roamer loses XP or leeches from his lanes, can miss kills, can botch tower dives, and certainly loses quite a bit of farm by leaving a lane. As it stands, junglers suffer very few of the consequences without a concerted effort by their opponents, and even then jungle fights are fairly risky for invaders.

I’m glad to see RiotStatikk paying close attention to the current thread on the forums, but I’m worried by the caveat he placed at the end of his call for help: “I will be reading this thread. Identify what you see as the root problem and offer solutions on how to solve it with the least game-shaking changes possible.” I think it might be time for the game to get a decent shake. In fact, this is the perfect time to make some big changes. Season Two is forthcoming, hopefully giving people a chance to tune up their game and make some positive movement on the ladder. I can hardly imagine a better time to make some significant changes to prevalent player strategy and game mechanics.